Diversity kills: Chicago’s 750 murders per year

Tonight on NBC’s programme “60 Minutes”, former Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy will be speaking out on the intense violence plaguing Chicago, which has more murders per year than the entire Germany, a country of 80 million people. Chicago, a city of 2,7 million people, has had more than 750 murders in 2016, whereas the latest figure for Germany as a whole shows 716 murders per year.

So intense has the violence in Chicago become that many people fear a Detroit-style exodus from the city as particulary white middle-class residents are fleeing the conurbation. The movement away from the Chicago Metropolitan Area is having an knock-on effect on the entire federal state of Illinois. According to a report published in the Chicago Tribune in March 2016, “by almost every metric, Illinois’ population is sharply declining, largely because residents are fleeing the state”.

During the interview to be aired tonight on NBC, former police chief McCarthy describes the violence in Chicago as a “crisis”, saying: “When people are dying, yes, there’s a crisis. No two ways about it.”

Chicago is the city where Barack Obama first entered politics. While the liberal mainstream media in America blames “police racism” for the high murder rate in the city, which compares to that of South Africa, Lesotho and other countries in Africa, it is also obvious that crime predominates in the city’s South Side and other black areas. According to the Wikipedia article, Crime in Chicago:

“Murder rates in Chicago vary greatly depending on the neighborhood in question. Many neighborhoods on the South Side tend to be poorer, less educated, predominantly African American, and infested with street gangs.”

Garry McCarthy was fired as police chief amid the furore in the mainstream media over the shooting of Laquan McDonald, a 17-year old African-American on 20 October 2014. The police officer who had killed him after being attacked with a knife, Jason van Dyke, was indicted with first-degree murder. It was the first time that such a charge had been brought against an officer acting in the line of duty in Chicago. Liberal mayor Rahm Emanuel, facing a difficult re-election in 2015 and courting the black vote, railed against his own officer and police chief. The city of Chicago also settled for $5 million with Laquan McDonald’s relatives even before they had filed a civil claim.

The release of police dash-cam footage a year after the murder showed that the officer had indeed acted in self-defence, although his trial on the murder charge is continuing.

According to Garry McCarthy, the Laquan McDonald incident has had a “lingering effect” on policing in Chicago, with officers being too scared to defend themselves against gangs attacking them. Under the Obama administration, the US Justice Department also launched a “civil rights investigation” against the Chicago Police Department, which includes the practice of “racial profiling”. Officers are now required to justify stopping any black person by writing a report on each one, according to tonight’s edition of “60 minutes”.

Despite a rise of 58% in the Chicago murder rate in 2016, policing has decreased in all of Chicago’s 22 police precincts. The number of arrests in Chicago are also down by 28 percent since 2015,  a recent Chicago Sun-Times analysis found.